The Eastern vibe
I’ve been lucky enough to travel to China, back in 2013. My mum was working as a teacher over there, and because I feel the umbilical urge to be close to my mother at all times, I visited her in Shanghai for a week or so. When I was there, I COULDN’T ACCESS FACEBOOK. #wtf. I was forced to converse with my mother, rather than sit near her and look at my phone like I usually would. It got me thinking, surely all these Chinese people don’t sit on the couch and actually talk to their families? Turns out I was right. They don’t use Facebook, because it’s banned by their government, but they use other alternatives. So, as Crampton (2011) puts it more eloquently, “rather than eliminate social media, restrictions on foreign websites…have resulted in a flourishing home-grown, state-approved ecosystem in which Chinese-owned properties thrive”. Seems legit, but it also seems kind of draconian and government-controlled and 1984-ish. But that is merely my opinion.
Where I use Facebook to try and get a laugh out of my ‘friends’ by posting stupid memes, Crampton explains that the Chinese use it for more sincere purposes, such as “rural-to-urban migration that has separated families, the loneliness of the one-child generation, and a distrust of information from government-controlled media” (2011). The irony of the latter part of that quote is that social media in China is government controlled, but that is a point for another day.
The other thing I noticed about China was that there was stacks of people there. Shanghai alone has a population of over 25 million. More than the whole of Australia. And according to Chiu, Lin, & Silverman (2012), 91% of the population say they have “visited a social-media site in the previous six months”. I did a quick sum, and it means more than 1 billion Chinese people are using social media sites other than Facebook. You can see why Facebook is so keen to infiltrate the land of the red dragon, the sheer size of the market alone would be worth the amount of money that I struggle to comprehend (Minter 2016).
But I think its kind of cool, China has been like, ‘up yours’, to the West, and done things their own way. They do not bow to Zuckerberg and his constant pleas for access to the Chinese people. Good on you China, keep rolling to the beat of your own drum.
References
Chiu, C, Lin, D & Silverman, A 2012, China's social-media boom, McKinsey & Company, viewed 22 January 2017, <http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/marketing_sales/chinas_social-media_boom>.
Crampton, T 2011, 'Social media in China: The same, but different, China Business Review, Vol. 38, no. 1, pp. 28-31, viewed 22 January 2017, <http://www.thomascrampton.com/china/social-media-china-business-review/>.
Minter, A 2016, ‘Why Facebook Won’t Give Up on China’, Bloomberg View, viewed 22 January 2017, <https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-25/why-facebook-won-t-give-up-on-china>.











